SEARCHING STREET ADDRESS RANGES

Google has a peice of syntax that lets you enter number ranges into a search by putting two dots between two numbers. For example 2007..2011, will search for 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, or 2011, if any of those numbers appear in a page it will be returns in the search results. This can be useful when searching for money ranges, eg. $40..$120.

However i didn't use this syntax very often, until I recently discovered that it works within quotes. That means if you are searching a municipal website you can put a range of numbers before the name of a street, and find any mention of those addresses on the site. This is great when you are researching not a specific address but rather a strip, or block with numerous street addresses.

Here are a couple of examples of what the search might look like:

site:phila.gov “4800..5300 Baltimore”

or

site:toronto.ca "800..1200 Bathurst"

Note: If you add St. or Ave. to the end ofthe street name you will not get all the results since you will miss the full spellings, Street, and Avenue, and visaversa.

ChangeDetection

Changedection.com is a site that lets you monitor a webpage to see if it has changed. If it does change you get an email. Ideal for tracking a site that doesn't have a RSS feed. I got tipped off about this site a few week ago at the IRE confernce. I tried it out and have been impressed.

After signing up for an account, I entered a the url for the site I wanted to track. I then got brought to a page that gave me a lot of options; Do i want to be notified only if information is removed from the page? Or if it is added? How often to receive notification? Most importantly they let you enter a word that must appear on the page before you are notified.

When the page changes you get an email that contains a link to the changedetection site, where they show a summary of the new information (highlighted) and the removed inforamtion (crossed out).

I haven't had a great need for this tool yet, So far the most useful way i have put it to use is on the websites for annual conference. Now if they add the word '2010' I will find out and get a head up on the when they update their website with information on next years conference. However I am certain this tool will come in real handy in my research at some point.

TASER DATABASE

The CBC and Canadian Press colaborated on a great investigation into taser use by the RCMP. They used freedom of information requests to get a hold of incident reports that officers are required to file when ever they draw their taser. On the CBC website you can find extensive coverage including a list of taser related deaths and a search tool that lets you search the data they compiled.

Their searchable database lets you search during specific years, by province, by the type of incident, and by the number of cartriges/spin cycle used by the officer. You then get a list of reports and can read the details from the report.

In a quick look I found that there were 23 recorded times when eight or more stun and cartrige cycle were used since 2002. And That there were six recorded incidents of tasers being used on cell blocks.

On the CBC website they write:

“By putting a searchable version of our database online, we hope that people can discover a few more details about the use of a device that has been the subject of increased public scrutiny and political debate after the death of a Polish immigrant, Robert Dziekanski, who died shortly after being stunned five times with a Taser at Vancouver International Airport in October 2007.”

check out the web site here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/interactives/taser-deployment/

Tweeking Google URLS

To get the most from a google search you can tweak the URL of your searches.  This post looks at how to have the date a page was created, and longer snippets show up in your search results:

It was recently pointed out in a post on lifehacker. They got the idea (from digital inspitation), that you can find out the date that google thinks a page was first uploaded by cutting and pasting this line to the end of your URL:

&as_qdr=y15

your searches should now have dates in front of the snippets. it should look like this:

This got thinking about one of my favorite feature in the new googles search options, the ability to get longer snippets in your search results. (that means more text from each pages being displayed in the search results). Playing with the URL I discovered that instead of clicking through to this option, you can simply cut and paste the following to the end of the url of your google searches.

&tbs=sts:1

If you are using google to do research, these two tweaks will help you get to the really good stuff. And, if you want to get these options added to your searches automatically, you can cut and paste the following link into you browser, and bookmark it (or make it your home page.) 

www.google.ca/search?q=example&hl=en&sa=N&output=search&tbs=qdr:y15,sts:1

It should give you a search for the word "example", but if replace it with a new word the added features will remain. (i have played around with this a bit, but if it doesn't work for you please let  me know.)

WAYBACK MACHINE - PART 1

The Wayback Machine is a tool that lets you look at old copies of a website.

 Want to see what city council was saying 2 years ago? Want to see what the google home page looked like in 1998? Want to browse a web site that has gone off line? Want to find old copies of a document that was posted online?     ...Then this is the tool to use.

Just go to Archive.org. enter a URL in the search bar, and click the "take me back button". you will now have a page with a list of various dates. click on a date and you will see what the site looked like on that date, and from there you can browse around. 

The Wayback Machine sends robots all over the web taking snap shots of pages, in the same way that google does. While google tries to get the most rerent version of a site, throwing out old copies, the wayback machine on the other hand holds on to these copies, and lets you see old versions.

If you want to learn more about the Archive .org, the group that runs the wayback machine, then check out the following  20 min video. There is only about 1 minute that covers the Wayback machine (at 17:30), but it give sense of what the broader project of Archive.org is about. check it out here: 

I will soon put up some more posts on the way machine that look at how to make it useful, and what advanced search features you can put to use to get the most from this tool...

Crime reporting in Baltimore sums it up

A friend sent me an amazing article that ran in the Washington Post entitled In Baltimore No One Left to Press Police. It is by David Simon the man who created one of the best TV series ever made, The Wire. In the article he reflects on when he worked as a crime reporter and how much things have changed since then.  He use the case  of a police officer shooting an unarmed man that went nearly unreported in the baltimore sun. 

In the Article he writes:

There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.

Well, sorry, but I didn't trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick's identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn't anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.

I didn't trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that's the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.

My first reaction was that he summed up the the situation bang on. My view is that if you are a citizen journalist (or professional) this should be a call to step up to the plate and get serious about what you do, learn the technique, dig, prod, and be tenacious. 

More recently I saw a video of David Simon speaking that aired on democracy now.   

I think this gave me a better sense of what he was getting at.  He thinks journalism is a proffesion not a hobby. I would like to think that there are enough people out there who can do deepdigging and solid journalismwith passion as their main motivator, but it is true that finding the time and institutional memory is as large a challenge as devloping the nessesary skills.  futhernmore how do you get access to regular and costistant audiance.

I still feel that commited citizen journalists can step up to the challenge of doing seroius journalism. But there are a lot of questions Davis Simon poses that I don't have ansers for. What is clear is that anyone who wants to have journalism flourish in the furute has their work cut out for them.

Using Google Syntax: the Jeopardy technique

Here is a quick bit of Google syntax. A few months ago I was sitting artound with a couple friends, and we asked how many employees do you think Facebook has? One friend turned to Wikipedia, but did not find the answer. I suggested another approach that I have now come to call the Jeopardy Technique. When you have a question to do with facts, where the answer involves numbers, you state the answer to your question minus the bit of information that you do not have. You combine two pieces of syntax to make this work, the quotes ( “ ” ) and the wild card ( * ). In this case we used:

“Facebook has * employees”

Very quickly the answer came up in the snippets of the various search results, I think at the time the result said about 700 employees, but a more recent search shows an article written on April 1^st that says “Facebook has almost 800 employees”, while another article from March 11^th says “Facebook has nearly 1000 employees”. It is not an exactly clear which is most accurate, but it gives you a general range.

Of course you also get results that don't really apply to your search like “Facebook has helped corporations bolster employee morale ” or “Facebook has postponed its employees’ stock sale”. However if you add a third piece of syntax, the number range ( .. ) you can eliminate most (but not all) of the unwanted answers. The search will now look like this:

“Facebook has *..* employees”

or like this alternately like this:

“Facebook has * 1..1000000 * employees”

If you want only numbers and no additional words you can try this:

“Facebook has 1..1000000 employees”

Here are another couple examples:

-a search for “Jupiter has * moons” gives you a variety of answer including. 'Jupiter has 4 moons”, “Jupiter has four large moons and dozens of small ones” and “Jupiter has 63 moons”.

-A search for “Shakespear wrote *..* plays” provides the answer of 37 plays in the second and third results, while in the fifth result it gives the answer of 39 plays.

-In a search for “there are 1..100 species of penguins”, the vast majority of results state there are 17 species of penguin, one result claims there are 18 species and on 21 speices. For a long time penguin biologist did think there were 17 species of penguin, but more recently many of them have been arguing that one of these species should actually be divided into two separate groups. So 17 and 18 are both answers have truth in them. As for 21 species I am not exactly sure, where that number came from.

This technique works pretty well for finding the answer to questions where the answers are numeric facts. Of course if the answer is not a number this can be done even more easily, since you will need only the quotes and not the wild card. Just write the answer minus the last set of words. For example “the capital of Senegal is” ...Dakar, 'the fastest mammal is” ...The chetah, or “the CEO of Starbucks is” ...Howard Schultz.

Hopefully some of the techniques can come in useful to you. but it is also ment to be an example of how you can combine syntax in interesting ways. It should get you thinking creatively about how to put syntax into action.